But first I must understand what forces in the Japanese government are behind this. My friend gets a blank piece of paper and begins making circles. There is one for the prime minister’s office and one for the Diet, Japan’s parliament, and one for the information technology committee working for the prime minister, and one for the Ministry of Finance and several for other various ministries. My paper also has a rectangle labeled EFAC, but I forget what that stands for. Arrows and lines connect some of the circles and rectangles with one another, so I can see who is suggesting and implementing what. The explanation is further complicated by the need to understand the recent Cabinet reshuffling, when entire agencies moved from one ministry to another, and the ministries themselves wound up with new names. (Skeptics have failed to resist a comparison with rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic.) Then some arrows go from circles to names of initiatives like e-Japan Priority Policy Program, IT Basic Law, the e-Government Initiative, and so on.
During the process we experience the basic difference between a bureaucrat and an outsider. The more he explains, the more he thinks he’s making things clearer, and the easier it is to see how the system works. But with each circle and arrow, I’m more confused and wondering how such a Byzantine structure could ever work.
We’re on safer ground when he shows me the bullet charts for the e-Japan program that will presumably thrust the country to global high-tech leadership. It is ambitious, to say the least, and remarkably detailed in its goals. Here is just a taste of the litany of promises:
By the end of this year millions of adults will be taking basic lessons in computer skills, a regulatory structure will be drawn and all schools will have Internet access.
By 2002, the government will eliminate those stacks of papers on the desks of bureaucrats, replacing them with computer files.
By 2005, Japan will have info-nirvana. Everyone will have high-speed broadband, schools will be totally digitized, cyberterrorism eradicated, the citizenry armed with smart cards.
That’s impressive, but how can a nation known for economic conservatism “take revolutionary yet realistic actions promptly without being bound by existing systems, practices and interests, in order to create a ‘knowledge-emergent society’ where everyone can actively utilize information technology and fully enjoy its benefits”? (I am quoting from the vaguely Marxist, vaguely Marvin Minsky, language of an e-Japan strategy manifesto released by “IT Strategy Headquarters.”) After all, there is not much in the way of money to spare in the Japanese economy these days. To find out, I spoke to a different bureaucrat. Shuhei Kishimoto is a finance official who more recently taught at Princeton before rejoining the government as a director of the Media and Information Policy Bureau of the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry (or the Ministry formerly known as MITI). He is full of brio and optimism, even as he concedes that the plan has to confront a cultural legacy that hasn’t been friendly to venture capital, risk-taking or leveling the great telecom monopolies. Still, he feels that deregulation and a rebound by private industry, particularly small businesses, can do the trick. As the movement continues, the whole country may rise: “Information technology,” he says, “might be the gasoline for the Japanese economy.”
But he loses me when he speculates that technological conditions are right for a Japan comeback. The ’90s, he claims, were a period of intense structural innovation in high tech, and that is not Japan’s strength. Now, the Internet is more stable, he says, and at such points, traditionally, Japan has been able to create the secondary innovations that become the centerpieces of industry. I object for two reasons: First, I have met with enough Japanese wizards to know that there is creativity bottled up here to make actual breakthroughs, not just refine existing ones. And second, Internet technology is far from stable, but rather still in the midst of big changes.
On its face, the e-Japan initiative makes perfect sense, once you get past the basic contradiction of a top-down initiative designed to create a bottom-up revolution. Unlike previous misguided governmental techno-jihads-fiascoes that have resulted in things like an analog digital-television standard in the dawning days of digital TV-this seems to embrace seemingly foolproof ideas like deregulating the monopolistic telecom structure, getting more people high-speed Internet connections and increasing computer literacy.
But at the moment, the promises of e-Japan are just that. And the new Koizumi government, riding so high that you can smell the hubris, is loaded with promises. I attended a recent press conference held by economic-policy czar Heizo Takenaka, to explain the government’s big plans. The handout distributed to reporters had an idealistic promise contained in almost every sentence. (“We aim to resolve the nonperforming loans within two or three years…. We will promote the flow of education and research funds from the private sector…. We will control the growth of national medical expenses…. We will build a society that’s friendly to women….” Pages of this!) The IT initiative was only one of a series of vows seemingly hatched on the premise that everything economically counterproductive, no matter how deeply entrenched in national culture, infrastructure or cronyism, could be simply swept away, as if mere popularity was a sufficient weapon against them. But ultimately, the onus of meeting those vows will lie with the men behind the gray desks. And they didn’t look like revolutionaries to me.
